Google history and your ranking

If you’re using Google to see how your ranking is coming along with your keywords you may be coming up a rather large obstacle.

Google is always trying to give you the search results you want, which is great, but one of the ways they do this is by saving your search history. It figures that the things you search for more should rank higher, so it adds your search frequency to the rest of the factors it uses to decide how relevant a website is to you.

This can get in the way if you’re trying out the keywords you’ve chosen use on your website as you’ll not be getting a real world view of how you’re doing, rather a result based on all of the other times you’ve checked how you’re faring. So don’t crack open the champers just yet, when you discover you’re top of the search results… it may just be your computer’s search results.

Sign in to your Google account if you aren’t already and head to https://google.com/history and click the big blue ‘Remove all Web History’ button. To make things permanent, if your history is on, click ‘Pause’ and it’ll stop recording your history until you go back in and ‘Resume’.

Remember that even if you sign out of your Google account, your browser will continue to store your search history on a cookie which it will then update its history with when you log back in. So make sure you clear your cookies before checking how your site’s keywords are coming along.